How the Future Was : a work in progress

Will sat in the darkening room, in a strange time in which everything had changed but nothing was different. The photos on the far wall—a snowy field in Minnesota, Taylor on a pony in a green field, Elaine kneeling in the dirt wearing bright yellow gloves—they were all in their places. His chair, next to the phone table, still faced the glass doors and the patio garden. Outside, green was still green, blue still blue. Thirty minutes earlier he had been driving home up the canyon road, looking forward to the evening.

– How the Future Was

How the Future Was tells the story of a man’s attempt to recover from disastrous losses by driving across the US in pursuit of his runaway son.

When Will Cunningham’s wife dies in a plane crash, he sets out to find Taylor, a troubled but prodigiously talented teenage musician who has been gone for over a year.

It is 1999, and Will travels through a country enjoying peace and prosperity, one that looks forward to the turn of the millennium with optimism and bravado. But his transcontinental drive carries him into regions of darkness, personal and cultural, that haunt the future’s promise.

Will sat in the darkening room, in a strange time in which everything had changed but nothing was different. The photos on the far wall—a snowy field in Minnesota, Taylor on a pony in a green field, Elaine kneeling in the dirt wearing bright yellow gloves—they were all in their places. His chair, next to the phone table, still faced the glass doors and the patio garden. Outside, green was still green, blue still blue. Thirty minutes earlier he had been driving home up the canyon road, looking forward to the evening.